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Rights Organizations Call for No Borders on Gender Justice

For Immediate Release

Rights Organizations Call for No Borders on Gender Justice

NEW YORK, N.Y. - Today, as the United Nations begins its annual gathering on women’s rights, a coalition of international women’s, LGBTIQ, and immigrant justice organizations have launched a joint initiative called: No Borders on Gender Justice.

This coalition, participating in the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), highlights that this year’s session takes place under the shadow of escalated anti-immigrant, anti-refugee and anti-Muslim policies of the United States. The organizers point to the new executive order by the Trump Administration, set to take effect this Thursday, as the latest in an exclusionary trend that prevents women from exercising their rights to political participation at UN Headquarters.

Yanar Mohammed, President of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, spoke out in solidarity with women’s rights activists excluded by these policies. “This is not the time to keep us out of the meeting rooms, out of the decision-making spaces and away from our sisters at CSW,” she said.

An Indigenous Ixil women’s rights activist from Guatemala, who requested not to be named, said, “I was denied a visa to travel to the US for CSW. Coming from Guatemala or from Central America, we know the obstacles and discrimination that have stood in the way of us accessing international spaces in the US, like the UN in New York. This is a barrier to our work for human rights, worsening in this political climate of fear and exclusion.”

Organizers of this initiative have emphasized that the risk extends not only to access to CSW. Also at risk is rights advocates’ access to UN and international advocacy spaces year round. Moreover, those most affected are women and their families, far from UN spaces, who face hate crimes, criminalization, detention and deportation due to xenophobic policies.

The No Borders on Gender Justice initiative seeks to renew strategies to reclaim space to defend the full range of women’s human rights, protest racist and Islamophobic policies that bar access, amplify the demands of those who have been excluded, and deepen collaboration with women most at risk from authoritarianism.

Organizers have also released a platform of principles, available here. The organizations co-sponsoring this initiative are: MADRE, Just Associates (JASS), Center for Women’s Global Leadership, AWID, Urgent Action Fund, Women in Migration Network and OutRight Action International.

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MADRE is an international
women's human rights organization that works in partnership with
community-based women's organizations worldwide to address issues of
health and reproductive rights, economic development, education, and
other human rights. MADRE provides resources, training, and support to
enable our sister organizations to meet concrete needs in their
communities while working to shift the balance of power to promote
long-term development and social justice. Since we began in 1983, MADRE
has delivered nearly 25 million dollars worth of support to
community-based women's organizations in Latin America, the Caribbean,
the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Balkans, and the United States. For more information about MADRE, visit our website at www.madre.org.

Further

In the vile wake of Charlottesville - those sweaty young white men, pasty faces contorted, screaming, "Blood and Soil!" "Jews Will Not Replace Us!" "Fuck You Faggots!" - what to say? Just this: This is racism, domestic terrorism, pure hate. This is not who we are, and this is not ok. Most vital, those "whose pigmentation matches theirs" must speak "with unflinching clarity (or) we simply amen it... They need white faces speaking directly into their white faces, loudly on behalf of love."

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